LAROUCHE IN DETROIT
A U.S. President for All
Generations And All Nations
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Here is Lyndon LaRouche's Presidential campaign speech to 230 supporters at the Pontchartrain Hotel in Detroit, on Nov. 20. The candidate was introduced by Midwest campaign organizer Robert Bowen; by Michigan State Representative LaMar Lemmons, who hosted the meeting; and by State Representative Ed Vaughn. (See also excerpts from the extended question-and-answer session which followed LaRouche's presention). An mp3 audio archive of the event is available: http stream or ftp download.
Rep. Ed Vaughn: We've got some problems ahead of us, and we've got to fight; I believe we should always be prepared to fight. The man I'm going to introduce to you tonight, is always prepared.
He reminded me of this Michigan Senator. His name was Dominic Jacobetti. He went to Washington one time, and Jake told me this story. He was the most powerful man in the Michigan House of Representatives. He was Speaker. Jake said he was at the Waldorf Astoria, and he was supposed to make a speech, and he said, he just remembered that he left his teeth at home. And he had no teeth. He said, "I can't speak! What am I going to do?"
So, the man next to him went into his pocket, pulled out a set, gave them to him, and said, "Try these on." So, he tried 'em on and they were too big. He said, "I can't talk with these!" So, he went back in another pocket, and he said, "Well Senator, try these on." And he tried those on, and they were too small. He said, "No! No! What am I going do?" So, the man said, "Hold it. Wait." He went back in his pocket and brought a third set out. He said, "Now Senator, try these on." They were perfect fit!
So, the Senator said, "Sir, you must be a dentist." He said, "No, I'm an undertaker."
But, he was prepared. And, the man I'm about to introduce to you, this evening, is always prepared.
Now, I took Economics 101. Samuelson was the author. And I tell you, I didn't learn nothing until I started taking Economics 102, 3, 4, and 5, from Lyndon LaRouche! The man is brilliant. He's a spiritual humanist.
He is the man who oversees a new youth movement in America—the LaRouche organization youth. He is the man who won the last Democratic Presidential primary in the state of Michigan. [applause] He is America's premier economist. And he is the man with the sensible answers, to be the next President of the United States of America—Lyndon LaRouche! [applause]
Lyndon LaRouche: You always do it! You always do it. Ed, thank you.
Well, I'm happy, on this particular occasion, even though our Internet connection is going to many other parts of the world population, that here, I see before me, some old friends and people who were old friends, but I didn't know of it, of my generation. And therefore, as I speak before various audiences, in particular, I will make that generation, my generation, a point of reference.
For the following reason: We, in my generation, had a particular experience, and there's no one older than us, generally, who's had that experience. And all of you, here in the room, or hearing by way of the webcast, Internet, who had that same experience—that is, our generation.
We were raised, in the beginning, under the reign of Coolidge and Hoover. It was a terrible time. Some people thought it was prosperity, but it was terrible. We were, as a nation, essentially immoral. This was the Flapper Era, the era of pleasure-seeking, the era of get-rich-quick, and no particular morality.
I know. I was there. I lived through it.
But then came 1928-29, and already, in 1926-27, the farm belt in the United States began to collapse. Other people didn't care. But the farm belt was collapsing as a result of Coolidge's policies. And then came '29, and the great foolishness came to an end. And then, we had the Great Snow Job, then—today, we have John Snow, as Treasury Secretary, who tells us that the economy is growing, that prospects are wonderful. Then, we had pot in every chicken, or something of that sort. Or two cars, or two garages in every car, or something of that sort. Prosperity was just around the corner.
And the poverty got worse and worse, and it became worse around the world, and people called it the Great Depression.
Now, Hoover was not unintelligent, nor did he cause the Great Depression. But, he succeeded in making it worse, for which he gets full credit. Franklin Roosevelt, who was then the Governor of the State of New York, who was a descendant of a collaborator of Alexander Hamilton, Isaac Roosevelt: who headed a Bank of New York, which was allied with Hamilton against the traitor Aaron Burr. And Franklin Roosevelt maintained the tradition of that ancestor, in the patriotic tradition of the founders of our nation. He prepared for his role as President, by preparing the kinds of measures he would take, to pull the nation out of this disaster, which was ongoing while he was Governor.
The Hoover Administration tried to dictate to Roosevelt, the terms on which he'd go into office; to impose on Roosevelt, before he actually entered the Presidency; to impose policies, which in a sense, would have been something like the Bush policies of today. Roosevelt rejected that offer from Hoover. And the Hoover Administration cut him off. So, he walked into the White House without even a pencil, from the Inaugural Address. And from that moment, however, he ordered the beginning of the recovery of our economy.
Understanding Our History
Today, we face a similar situation. We've gone through a long period of idiocy—and I'll go through some of the experiences, starting from my experience, and the experience of some of you in this room, to give you a sense of who you are. Of whatever generation you are, whatever your age is: I can tell you who you are. In the sense of who you are as a generation, what the experiences are, which over the course of the past century, have struck you. You may not have experienced them in your flesh, but you experienced them transmitted from your parents, your grandparents, and so forth. And they're part of you. And, if you understand what this experience is, what is part of you, passed down from one generation to the next, then you are better able to cope with the great crisis which faces us now, when we're in the worst financial-monetary crisis of modern world history, which is now ongoing.
Some of you younger ones, have conditioned yourself to think that these conditions are bad, but more or less normal; to think that these things that are going on now, can continue; to think that there's an alternative for the next President of the United States, which is not me. And, I'll shock you: There is no such alternative. And you're not going to find one. And I'll make it clear to you why.
Under Roosevelt, most of you my age remember, the United States turned up. We were gray-faced. You had people who had been on the bread lines for two or three years, when Roosevelt came to power. I saw some of them. I saw their faces. Their faces had turned gray, because they didn't know where they were going. They were more or less like the homeless of the United States today. No place to go home to. No future. Struggling from one day to the next—many people were like that.
Take this part of the world; take the Winter of 1932, which was a particularly cold winter. Many people who had had jobs, and had homes earlier, were surviving in "hobo jungles," and there was a bitter-cold Winter, that 1932 Winter, and people died in hobo jungles, which in those days were usually found alongside the railroad tracks someplace.
Those were the conditions of life, and Roosevelt changed that, in gradually infusing in the American people a sense of optimism: that things were going to get better. Well, they got better slowly. But they got better.
Then, you had programs, public employment programs, and other programs which began to move things upward. By 1935, 1936, we had begun to become human again; we began to have some sense of confidence—1938, after a slight recession that year, we became a little more confident.
We then entered a war, which Roosevelt knew was coming. We participated in that war, we mobilized for that war, we were pre-mobilized for it. And we won that war. We won it, not because we were the best soldiers in the world. We weren't. I was there—we weren't. But, we had the best logistics in the world. And, we won the war because we had the best logistics in the world. And the best logistics came from our farms, and our factories, and things like that.
We were a great producer society. And when V-E Day came, the day of peace in Europe, the world was happy, and we were happy. And then, came V-J Day: And we weren't so happy any more. And that's the beginning of an ugly story.
What happened? First of all, we, with our logistics, and with the generalship of MacArthur, had won the war in the Pacific. True, there had been some very serious battles. A lot of Americans and others had died. There were some unnecessary battles: Iwo Jima was not necessary; but a lot of courageous men died at Iwo Jima, fighting because they were told to fight, a battle that was unnecessary. But, MacArthur, by avoiding battles where they were not necessary, and using our air and naval power and other logistical superiority to dominate increasingly the entire Pacific region; we were able to bring Japan to the point—with a blockade, a naval blockade, an aerial blockade—where the island-nation of Japan was dependent on imports of raw materials and so forth from the continent of Asia, could no longer secure those imports. Japan was a defeated nation, not merely on the field of battle, but defeated by American logistics.
Japan had already negotiated the attempt to surrender, through the Emperor—through the Papacy, through the Vatican, through the Office of Extraordinary Affairs, with a gentleman then known as Monsignor Montini, later known as Pope Paul VI. That offer of surrender had been negotiated with Washington, but Truman refused to accept it.
It is said, what Truman did, is Truman took two nuclear bombs, which we had in our arsenal—the only two nuclear bombs we had in our arsenal—and he dropped those bombs on the civilian populations of two Japan cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And we weren't too happy, when V-J Day came. We were glad the war was over. But, the smell of victory had turned to a stink, as a result of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had done the unnecessary. Then, when Japan surrendered, Japan surrendered under exactly the terms, which had been negotiated through the Vatican, before this happened. The occupation of Japan occurred under exactly the terms and conditions, that had been planned and conceded by the Emperor of Japan, prior to those bombs being dropped. There was never a need to do it.
Where the Nation Lost Its Mission
But that was not the end of the story. That was just a bad experience. The idea of this superweapon, that could kill masses of people—a single weapon—so many, so terribly, all at once. Take the case of the Enola Gay, which now going up in a museum outside Washington: The pilot went crazy, from the sense of guilt over what they had done, in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.
But, it was worse, as I said. We had people, like a man of peace, called Bertrand Russell: Bertrand Russell was the inventor of the nuclear weapon. He admitted it. He was the one who had started the nuclear weapons program in the United States. He was the one, who planned nuclear preventive war, to bring about world government. And that's why some of you, of my generation, were very unhappy about the end of the war. Because Winston Churchill came to Fulton, Missouri, and made a speech about the "Iron Curtain," and we were then committed, in fact, under Truman, to prepare for conducting preventive nuclear war against the Soviet Union. And that continued.
And Truman, who was a little man—very little in soul, in spirit, if any at all—who made adventures against nations of the world, assuming that Russia and China would not fight back, because they were afraid of the nuclear weapons we didn't yet have—we could produce them, but did not yet have. So, they made a provocation against China. As a result of it, suddenly the North Korean army overran South Korea. The South Korean army was wiped out—later to be rebuilt—was wiped out, then, and the American forces were trapped in a small perimeter, at the southern tip of Korea in Pusan. And then, MacArthur outflanked the situation with the Inchon landing. It was on. And then Truman got rid of MacArthur.
Because, what Truman's policy was, was Russell's policy: To establish an Anglo-American world empire, through the use of weapons so terrible, that the world would submit to world government, rather than face the deadly weapons of this type. And, many of you who came back from military service, at the end of the war, had been optimistic near the end of the war, because we knew we had won the war; we knew we had become a prosperous and powerful nation again; we had recovered from the effects of the Depression. Your optimism was spoiled, because the FBI came sneaking around, to find out if you really were ready to fight those Commies and drop the bombs on them.
One neighbor turned against another. Everybody was turning everybody else in, and became rotten. Men who had been courageous fighters, courageous, dedicated patriots coming out of the war, lost it. I know them. I knew them personally. I saw them after the war. Naturally, you know, the war's over, you go look up your old buddies, and you talk to them and find out what they're doing. It wasn't good. They turned into cowards.
Some of us fought against it. I did. I was convinced to. I tried to get Eisenhower to run for President, in 1947. He sent me back a nice letter, acknowledging my argument—get this bum Truman out of there; run for President. That we, who had gone to war, the best of us at least, had come back with some sense that we had a mission. We were the one nation, the power on this planet: We had a chance to bring about a just world order, as Roosevelt had promised. We could end colonialism. We could create a world, with our influence, of sovereign nation-states—not an American Empire, but a world of neighbors, of sovereign nation-states. We could help them become strong with our economic power. We could cooperate with them. We could eliminate the possibility, of putting the world through another kind of war, such as the two world wars we had just gone through in that century.
We were optimistic. Suddenly, this went. We turned against each other. We lost our optimism. Then, Truman got us deeper and deeper, and the Korean War had started.
Then, in the course of that, someone discovered that the Soviet Union had developed the first deployable thermo-nuclear weapon on the planet. At that point, a nuclear-armed United States was not going to be capable of making a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
We entered therefore, into a new order of things. Truman was told not to run again. And he didn't. They wouldn't even let a Democrat become President, because of what Truman had done to the Democratic Party. It was not McCarthyism that was the problem: It was Trumanism! And now, as then, the Democratic Party has some bad things in it.
The Shocks of 1962-63
So, we turned to a man, who, like MacArthur, was opposed to these kinds of military policies: Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, whose first act, in campaigning for President—significant act—was to go to Korea, and say, "I can end our war in Korea."
So we elected Eisenhower. And we felt better, even though Adlai Stevenson was not disliked. We felt better, because we thought we had avoided the worst. And we had eight years of relative peace, under Eisenhower. But, we had skunks in there—two Dulles skunks, Allen and John Foster. And some others, who were lurking there in the woodwork, ready to strike. Eisenhower left office, at the beginning of '61, and made a speech, warning the American people against what Truman had represented: the "military-industrial complex." That wasn't the name I call it, but that was a fair descriptive name.
Jack Kennedy was President, but Jack was not prepared quite to deal with what he was getting into. He was taken by surprise by certain things he didn't understand clearly, until he understudied a few things at the bedside of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who explained some things to him; that caused Jack to realize he had to pull out of the Vietnam/Indo-China operation, and not have an Indo-China war. MacArthur told him: "Don't go into a land war in Asia. No U.S. land war in Asia."
Kennedy thought it was a good idea. He took this fellow you know—McNamara—he took him to the White House and he gave him a tongue-lashing. He probably has still got scars on his back, from the tongue-lashing that Jack Kennedy gave him. If you could get him to come out in the open, he would probably admit that. And, Jack humiliated McNamara: He made him stand on the White House steps and forswear everything that McNamara was committed to. He said, we were going to pull out of this Indo-China operation. We're going to get out of there.
But then, Jack was killed. And, Johnson was terrified.
Now, Johnson did a couple of good things: The two best things he ever did, were two Civil Rights bills. One was the Voting Rights Act, which he put his neck on the line, personally for. And, Johnson was still courageous on some things.
But: When it came to the issue of war, he could see those three rifles that had aimed at Jack, were aimed at him. And he signed on to the war in Indo-China.
Now, in the meantime, we'd gone through one other terrible experience: In 1962, October of that year, in the United States people were running into bars, looking for God, because they thought they were going to be blown up by a thermonuclear barrage, any next morning. This shock not only hit my generation, but hit the generation of young people, who were then adolescents, who were about to become the Baby-Boomer generation of the mid-1960s.
As a result of that, and the Vietnam War, many of the younger generation then entering university, went crazy. This began about the time the Beatles scuttled across the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show, and the great cultural paradigm shift, or the cultural degeneration shift occurred. Because these young people were so terrified—terrified of the reality with which they had been associated—that they decided, "This society is no good. We've gotta drop out. Technology is bad."
And so, we had the Baby-Boomer generation. The flight from reality.
No Longer a Producer Nation
So, we were transformed from the greatest producer nation on this planet, into becoming a post-industrial society. In going from the great producer nation, to becoming the predatory, great consumer nation. This happened as a process, a process which was accelerated by 1971-72. In 1966, Nixon went down to Mississippi, to Biloxi, and there, he met the Ku Klux Klan, and he saw God. This was the beginning of the Southern Strategy. Which the Democratic Party, in more later years, began to try to imitate. They called it the "Suburban Strategy." You may have heard about it.
So, we became rotten. And under the influence of Nixon's Administration—or actually, he was a captive of Henry Kissinger, but that's all right—under that, in 1971-72, the post-war monetary system, which had been developed by President Roosevelt, was shut down. And we had a new kind of monetary system, the so-called floating-exchange-rate monetary system, which is this now.
What's happened is, over this period, from the period of the early '60s: the Missile Crisis, the assassination of Kennedy, and the entry into the Indo-China War; there has been a cultural transformation in our people. This cultural transformation has gone on, it's unfolded, it's developed. But we're now at the fag-end of it.
We've now reached the point, where we live on the basis of virtually slave-labor in China, on the basis of Mexican labor—of a Mexico which no longer has real economic sovereignty; we destroyed that, from 1982 on—looting much of the world, to produce for us, what we no longer produce for ourselves. Our farms are ruined. Our farmers are ruined. Our industries are ruined. Our jobs have fled. What is made in Detroit, is no longer made in Detroit: It's assembled from what's made in many parts of the world, and that increasingly so. Our productive industries are gone. Our infrastructure has collapsed. Our mass transit has collapsed. Our air travel system is crazy, and collapsing. Our power generation and distribution systems are disintegrating.
We've come to the point that the debt of the United States, under present conditions, could never be paid; and that is the condition of much of the world, besides.
We are now at the end of the great cultural paradigm-shift, from being the great producer nation, that Roosevelt's recovery enabled us to become, to becoming a ruined, and rotten, post-industrial society, a consumer society, living by driving down the values of currencies of other nations, and forcing them to work for us, as virtual slave-labor, by ruining themselves.
But we, while ruining and sucking on the blood of these other nations, have also ruined ourselves at home. We've destroyed our own people. The HMO program is mass-murder; it accelerates the death rate, and a willful acceleration of the death rate through the HMO system, is nothing but systematic mass-murder. Mass-murder of our own citizens. Our education system is an abomination, as well as our health-care system. Our general infrastructure is rotten. Our industries are fled.
We are now at the end of a process, under which the values which people have been conditioned to accept, as normal values—the values which have guided them in voting, in deciding what they put up with—has changed the population, to the point that what people think they ought to do today, by instinct, is wrong. And, the candidates they think they should vote for, are the wrong choice.
What's Wrong With the Voters?
Now, take a look at some of the candidates. Take a look at Senator Kerry, the Democratic candidate. (I'll say nothing about the poor dummy, who's now the President. He has no qualification whatsoever, except meanness, and that doesn't get you very much.) Look at Kerry: Now, Kerry's not a stupid guy. Personally, man to man, he's not an uncourageous person, he's an intelligent person. Why is he behaving so stupidly? You have, you know, Gephardt is not a great genius, but he's sort of a normal political man. Why is he behaving so stupidly? Well, on the rest I won't say much.
But, why do we choose—why does the party itself, the national Democratic Party, produce nothing but stupid candidates? Or unqualified ones, even among people who themselves are personally qualified as human beings, to make many kinds of important decisions in government?
Why can't we find a President—who is qualified for the office, at this time?
Why can't we find voters, who are qualified to choose a suitable President, at this time?
So, that's the nature of the problem: We're not really in the process of trying to choose a President. We have to recognize, there's something wrong with the voters themselves. Otherwise, we wouldn't have picked the idiot we picked recently. There's something wrong with the voters! Not merely a lack of courage. Admittedly many people are afraid: They vote for certain candidates, because they're afraid to be caught not voting for them. When you have a trade union and a political party machine, which is ready to ruin you and destroy your life, if you don't "go along to get along"—hmm? Sure, it's true: People are terrified into voting for these candidates. Terrified into not voting for me! They're terrified with threats on their job; they're terrified by their union, of victimization there. There's a reign of terror by these institutions—including the Democratic Party and some of the unions in this country—a reign of terror against the people, to try to intimidate them, into voting for incompetent candidates, and incompetent policies.
But, that's not the end of it. The problem lies in the people themselves. A people that is determined not to be slaves will not be slaves.
What are we enslaved to, then? What are so many of our citizens enslaved to? They're enslaved to their habits: the habit of post-industrial society; the habit of living in this kind of consumer/pleasure society.
Look at Detroit: The jobs have gone! What comes in? The casinos. Is a casino a productive enterprise? It produces the money from your pockets into somebody else's—the croupier takes your money. You had the case of this boat on the Mississippi, a gambling boat, floating casino: It went to one city, got the money out of that population, and moved on to the next city! Moved down to St. Louis, to try to loot the people of St. Louis next! Why do people gamble? Why do they gamble, when they're poor? Don't they know they're going to lose? Otherwise, they wouldn't set up gambling casinos, unless it was rigged to have the suckers lose! So why do people go in there, like shark-bait, to be eaten?
Why do they consider that an alternative, to industry? To agriculture? To efficient power production and distribution? Why do they accept that? Because they've been conditioned that that's the way it is. This is what we've learned. In 40 years, we've learned how not to be like what we were 40 years ago.
We've learned, like the Romans. The Romans had conquered pretty much of the world, from Italy. Beginning with the end of the Second Punic War, they introduced mass slavery into Italy itself. They shut down production inside Italy, because they began to steal from the rest of the world, the conquered world. They turned their population into a system of "bread and circuses." Bread was passed out, like welfare. There were no jobs, no real income. To keep the population quiet, you open up the casinos: the Coliseum. You got in there, and watched people kill each other, for your entertainment! You watched animals eat people, for your entertainment—as you do, when you watch television or go to movies today. It's what you do, when you go to one of these mass rock concerts, and so forth. The same thing: "Bread and circuses." Crumbs to get by on. Entertainment to take the pain; drugs to take the pain away.
We are destroying our population, because we are accepting this change in values, which came on, as it did for ancient Italy, upon us, today.
How We Came To Destroying Our Nation
That is the reason why I started tonight, the way I did. Because, when you look back, and look at the experience of those of my generation, who are here, tonight: Recall what our experience was. Recall the experience of our generation's children; the experience of our generation's grandchildren. And then, look at our grandchildren and our children, from my generation, and see what happened to them. What happened to their minds. How they were changed, to become people who would willingly submit to a process, by which they are destroying themselves.
Because you have the power. People have the power, intrinsically, if they're willing to exert it, to change things. A generation older than mine, my parents' generation, voted for Roosevelt, supported Roosevelt, and took us out of a time, when we were culturally rotten, back in the 1920s, and brought us back to becoming ourselves, so we emerged from the war, as a great producer nation, a power in the world for good, if Roosevelt had lived.
We were still a producer nation, up till the middle of the 1960s. We helped Europe develop. We contributed to the development of many other parts of the world. We were useful, despite the fact that we were being bad at the same time. But, then, with the Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and the beginning of the Indo-China War—and the beginning of the great cultural paradigm-shift, which started on the stage of Ed Sullivan's CBS show with the Beatles—with that, we became something else. We didn't become rotten all at once. We became rotten, step by step, by step, by step. Every time you accept doing a rotten thing, you become a bit rotten yourself. But that becomes a habit. And that's what happened to us.
Now therefore, what will change us? What will save us? We have to change our way of thinking. And the first thing to do, is to recognize what the changes were, in these three successive generations, which have brought us to point, that we are inflicting upon ourselves our own destruction as a nation. That's the problem.
It's my job, not merely as a candidate, to do that for you. To try to induce you to look into yourselves, to look into the experience of my generation, look into the experience of my children's generation, my grandchildren's generation. See what they've gone through, how the cowardice of the returning veteran, in suburbia, taught their children never to tell the truth—"It might get you into trouble. Say what is expected of you! Never say what you think: Say what you want to be overheard saying." This is a typical Baby-Boomer mentality.
When the Baby-Boomer mentality was hit, by the combination of the Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination—and "Lawd! Horrors! We have to go over, us nice little kids, we have to go to Vietnam, and fight that war? We don't do that! That's not nice!" So, by these kinds of terrors—"We'll flee into drugs, instead of going to Vietnam; we'll destroy ourselves with drugs." So, by this process, we've corrupted ourselves as a people.
But people who are capable of making scientific discoveries, intrinsically—people can see what's wrong with their own minds. They can see how their minds were ruined over successive generations, by the change in opinion.
People can change themselves. Animals can not change themselves. People can change themselves. And they can change themselves because they have a higher power, to reflect upon themselves, to decide what they wish to become.
The Relation Between Our Generations
People of my generation also have another advantage: We're going to die soon. And therefore, our values are improved thereby. Because we don't think of what we're going to get. We think of what we're going to give—what we're going to give to coming generations. The meaning of our life, our sense of immortality, is what we give, that is, if we're smart; if we're not stupid. We don't expect to take anything. We expect to give.
And that's our strength. If we look at ourselves as people who are going to give, rather than take, then we use our lives to say, "I can die with a smile on my face, because I have given something! My life means something, because I gave something to humanity. I gave honor to the achievements and contributions of the generations that came before me. And I give a future to my grandchildren, and those of my grandchildren's generation."
That gives you strength, because you have a sense of spirituality, a sense that man is not a piece of flesh: that man is a mind, which exists only in the human being. And that mind has a quality, immortality. And therefore, the meaning of your life, is what you do with what you are while you're here. Something that will last. Something that will make your ancestors smile, and make your descendants happy, and proud of you.
When you look at yourself, and say, "That is my interest; that is what I wish to become, that kind of person. To achieve that kind of immortality—legitimate immortality—that I have earned." Then you have the power to change yourself, and change the way you think, in a scientific way, by looking at experience, as I tried to summarize that kind of experience to you tonight: To look at the experience of successive generations, to see how ideas and passions are transmitted from one generation to another. And how the young generation coming into the field now, the one I'm so happy about—the youth generation, the 18- to 25-year-old, university-eligible age youth—why they're so important, to me and to you: Because, if we can enable them to help convince their parents to come back to the human race—leave Baby-Boomerism, and come back and start thinking about the future of humanity. If those two generations—the generation of my children and my grandchildren's generation—if those two generations start working together, to change society, to meet the challenge of the present, we have, in our nation, a great tradition, if we can recognize it. We have the power, the influence—if we do that—to influence the course of world history.
Economic Recovery and a Durable Peace
Not as an empire. Not as a dictator. I have friends in India, I have friends in Russia, I have friends throughout Europe, I have friends in South America, I have friends in Africa: These are my friends. We have the power, in the United States. If I can act as a friend of these friends, we can bring the nations together, with the example of the struggle to establish our republic, and to bring forth in us the best that we have been: We have the ability to bring these nations together, and say, "Here we are. We're in this period, where we're all afraid of the spread of a nuclear-armed war, being organized by people like Cheney and the so-called neo-conservatives; and some of the Democrats, like Lieberman and so forth, who are going along with it—we can avoid this. We can avoid plunging this planet into war. We have a great economic crisis. We can lead, in creating a recovery from this world economic crisis, as Roosevelt led, in bringing us out of the last world crisis. We can do that."
We can take my friends abroad, we can bring them together, and we can say: We all going to be sovereign republics. No empire. Nothing like empire. We're going to create what John Quincy Adams and other great leaders of the United States intended: On this planet, a community of perfectly sovereign republics, which are united by principles akin to those enshrined in the Preamble of our Federal Constitution. We can actually create an order of peace on this planet, a durable peace. Which can survive.
We can do that, now.
I can do that now, if I'm President. I could do it, today, if I were President. All the resources are there. We could recover from this depression. All the potential is there. We simply have to decide that we're not going to continue to play the game—the game which was brought upon us, when we submitted, one after the other, to these things that betrayed what Franklin Roosevelt had tried to give us in his lifetime.
Not as a result, but as the ability to make the decision, to achieve those results: We can do it.
And now, there are other matters you want to discuss, and I will discuss them, as you ask about them.
Thank you.
